Re: Detecting OS-provided software on Linux

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2014-01-22 at 22:56 GMT, Iain Morgan wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I'm hoping to use pkgsrc to build software that will be used within
> environment modules on a shared filesystem for a compute cluster.
> 
> Initial tests are promising, but I've noticed that pkgsrc does not
> detect all the software that was installed by the native (RPM) packaging
> system. The resultant duplication of software is inefficient and
> undesirable; particularly as I will have multiple independent software
> trees managed by separate pkgsrc instances.
> 
> What I would like, is some way to either export information from a
> system's RPM database to pkgsrc, or some means for pkgsrc to dynamically
> query the installed RPM's when checking dependencies. Is there any easy
> way to do either of these?
> 
> Assuming that there isn't already a script to create "fake" pkgsrc
> database entries corresponding to the installed RPM's, what would be the
> minimum that would need to be created for each entry to satisfy
> dependency checks?
> 
> Also, is there any support for using environment modules with pkgsrc? 

Hi Iain,

This only works with a limited number of libraries, and in that
instance you can use PREFER_PKGSRC=no in your mk.conf to ensure that
the builtin versions are used.

If you are bootstrapping, use '--prefer-pkgsrc=no' to automatically
put this into mk.conf.

To see whether a package supports this, check that there is a
builtin.mk file in its pkgsrc directory.  This generally only works
with libraries, it doesn't work for e.g. python as there are too many
issues with doing that.

Regards,

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com